With April 5th the birthday of my favorite actress, it seems the perfect time to share the book that my favorite Bette Davis movie is taken from.
Now, Voyager by Olive Higgins Prouty was published in 1941 and just a year later Warner Bros. released the movie. While not Davis's best critical success by any means, it is the movie I must stop and watch every time TCM plays it.
It's no surprise that while the movie is fabulous, the book is even better. The movie screenwriter was wise enough to include much of the actual dialogue from the book, including the Walt Whitman lines Prouty used on the title page:
The untold want, by life and land ne'er granted,
Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.
If ever someone needed to seek their untold want, it was Charlotte Vale, far away from her domineering mother. While I cannot imagine a better actress to have played the part of Charlotte than Bette Davis, I was fascinated by Prouty's own word picture of her that she opened the book with:
She looked as if she might have recently been ill. She had little natural color, and no artificial color whatsoever. There was something that suggested old ivory about the cast and quality of her skin. Her cheek-bones were high and accentuated by hollows in her cheeks. her brows were black, well-defined, and extraordinarily far apart. Her hair was black--what could be seen of it. It was cut very short. Her eyes were the somber blue of late-blooming monk's-hood. She was dressed in the conservative good taste that is expensive. A navy blue costume, very plain and very perfect, with a small snug navy-blue hat on her close-cropped head. Over her shoulders hung the pelts of several little animals, probably Russian sable. She caused much comment among the other passengers because of the incongruity between her distinguished appearance and her wary manner.
For those familiar with the movie, you'll notice that the book opens with the transformation of Charlotte Vale after her stay in an expensive sanitarium following her nervous breakdown, while that part comes much later in the movie.
Olive Higgins Prouty wrote honestly about mental illness because she was a sufferer of it herself and I read online that she wrote very accurately about psychotherapy, something that few authors of the time did.
And here in the rough draft that I wrote Sunday morning while watching CBS Sunday Morning is where my notes end because I went on to watch Face the Nation and Margaret Brennan's video call interview with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, including current news and pictures.
I've often turned to books these last horrifying weeks to distract me from the news I cannot turn off. But even a book I loved like Now, Voyager cannot help when faced with such atrocities being committed against innocent people. I had to get up, go to my kitchen and bang pots and pans angrily together and when that didn't help, go outside in the cold but sunny day with BreeBree and James Mason and cry helplessly.
And life goes on here in America.
Last week I went to our local library for the first time in years. After organizing my bookshelves this winter I realized I should stop buying more books (most of the time) and start finding them at the library, one fabulous thing that is still free.
I picked out three novels and a new Susan Loomis cookbook, which I later ended up ordering because there were too many good recipes to copy. Ha, so much for my good intentions! One new idea at the library was a rack of Lucky Day books, new popular releases that you could only choose one of, with no renewal.
I chose a new Anne Tyler book called French Braid.
My apology to Anne Tyler fans but I finally laid this book aside after three nights' reading, hoping it would get better (happier). It didn't.
Next I opened Sarah Addison Allen's First Frost, chosen because I think I remember liking her Garden Spells. Even it took awhile for me to warm up to but I ended up enjoying it, the ending especially.
I need happy endings.
I'm grateful to be starting a library routine again. So many of the new books I've bought the last few years have not been put on my own bookshelves but rather passed on or donated. Very few new authors join the books on my eight bookshelves to be read again and again.
There's no hope for me. I like old music, old books, old movies. I won't say "old" actors but rather say "actors from the past."
Happy Birthday, Bette Davis!
From Ladies' Home Journal, June 1951, the original Bette Davis eyes.
